In August, Taft delivered two more impressive speeches on the Philippines, one in St. Louis and the other at Chautauqua. Increasingly confident in his area of expertise, Taft nevertheless remained anxious about a campaign appearance in Montpelier, Vermont, at the end of August. “The next ten days I must devote myself to the preparation,” he told his wife. For better than twenty years, Taft had not given a purely political speech, and feared he was “a bit rusty on general politics.” Indeed, he mused, “the Bench disqualifies one in this respect.”
Roosevelt was particularly eager for Taft to speak in Vermont, where the September state elections were considered an important indicator of the vote in the presidential contest. Though the Green Mountain State generally leaned Republican, “the size of her majority” was thought to portend “the trend of public opinion.” Rather than presenting an overview of Republican policies, Taft chose to focus on Roosevelt’s leadership, mounting a spirited defense against repeated charges that the president was a bully, whose dictatorial demeanor toward Congress transgressed the constitutional separation between executive and legislative powers. “When Theodore Roosevelt is attacked for being a strong-headed tyrant, obstinate in his pride of opinion, and failure to listen to argument, I am in a position to know,” he reassured his audience of more than 1,500 Vermonters. “In all my experience I never have met a man in authority with less pride of opinion,” he asserted. “I have never met a man who was so amenable to reason, so anxious to reach a just conclusion, and so willing to sacrifice a previously formed opinion.” Rather than a litany of clichéd tributes, Taft’s vivid, personal testimony concerning the president’s nature and character won the interest and enthusiasm of his listeners.
“It was a success,” he told Nellie, proudly relaying that he was “told by many that it was thought to be the best political speech delivered in Vermont.” The press concurred: “It would be difficult to praise it too highly,” one Pennsylvania paper editorialized. “Judge Taft had already attained a high reputation as a jurist and executive officer.” Now, he had established himself “as a political orator of the first rank. . . . Probably no member of the President’s cabinet will prove more effective in defense and support of his administration.” Published in its entirety in the Boston Transcript, Taft’s speech promised to become “a text-book for Republican orators and writers.” Most important, the Vermont vote proved a “glorious” triumph for Republicans, with a larger margin than anyone had predicted. “I am pleased as Punch about Vermont,” Roosevelt exclaimed to Taft, adding that the unforeseen magnitude should “cut off some of the money supply of our adversaries.”
Taft next proceeded to Portland, Maine; Roosevelt had received “a rather gloomy letter” from Senator Eugene Hale about Republican prospects in the state and hoped that Taft’s presence could help energize support. Buoyed by positive reactions, Taft prepared himself “to speak without notes” for the first time. Despite initial anxiety that his memory might fail and leave him floundering, his performance went smoothly.
Taft continued north to Murray Bay for a final two weeks of vacation before the true rigors of the campaign began. To his “great surprise,” a large contingent of Murray Bay residents appeared at his house on the night of his forty-seventh birthday. A torchlight parade escorted him to the Bay’s largest house, where they feasted and drank, danced the Virginia reel, sang songs, presented gifts, and proposed toasts.
Taft wrote to Roosevelt every other day during his vacation, planning future speeches, exchanging political gossip, discussing Parker’s campaign. “Mrs. Taft says that you must be bored by the number of letters that I write you,” he jested; “now that I have my Secretary with me you may expect more.” Ease and camaraderie mark their correspondence from this period as they discussed matters both personal and political: Roosevelt complained freely about their mutual friend Maria Storer; Taft described a new diet requiring him to refrain from drinking all liquids with his meals; Roosevelt cursed the “infernal liars” in the independent press—“the New York Times, Evening Post, Herald”—with their outrageous claims that he had sent “a corruption fund” to influence the vote in Vermont; Taft recounted “playing golf every day in air that is as invigorating as dry champagne without any evil after effect.”
Upon his return to Washington in late September, Taft was immediately dispatched to Ohio, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. “Do not in any speech take any position seeming in the least to be on the defensive,” Roosevelt cautioned. “Attack Parker. Show that his proposals are insincere; his statements lacking in candor, and disingenuous. Announce that we have not the slightest apology to make; that we intend to continue precisely as we have been doing in the past; that we shall not abandon building up the navy and keeping up the army, or abandon rural free delivery, or irrigation of the public lands. Either Parker is insincere, or else he must propose to abandon these works and other works like them in order to economize.”
On October 1, Taft opened the Republicans’ Ohio campaign with a daylong extravaganza in Warren’s public square that featured marching bands, songs, and large delegations from neighboring Cleveland, Youngstown, and Akron. With nearly 2,000 people in attendance, the campaign kickoff was considered “the most auspicious in years.” Sharing the platform with the state’s governor and two U.S. senators, Taft delivered the keynote address. Following Roosevelt’s directives, he targeted Parker directly, saving his most stinging condemnation for the gross distortions and outright lies the Democratic candidate had spread about the administration’s expenditures in the Philippines. “After reading the statements of Judge Parker concerning the Philippines,” Taft repeatedly avowed, “I sometimes wonder whether I was ever there.”
Taft would have welcomed Nellie’s company on the campaign trail, but she had to settle the family into their new house at 1904 K Street in Washington and prepare the children for school. In daily letters, she related her progress in unpacking cartons of furniture, carpeting floors, setting up beds, working with carpenters, and arranging books in the library. With Robert attending Horace’s boarding school in Watertown, Connecticut, only the two younger children remained at home. Thirteen-year-old Helen joined Ethel Roosevelt at the National Cathedral School. Seven-year-old Charlie was enrolled in the local public school, where he became great friends with Quentin Roosevelt. “I hope Charley’s first day in school was a success,” Taft wrote from Indiana. “I can remember mine. It was not.”
As the campaign ground on, Taft’s yearning to be home with his wife and children intensified. “I wish I could get on the train and go right to you now,” he told Nellie early in October. With each passing day, he grew wearier of presenting the same speech. In Indianapolis, the crowd grew restless, some departing early as he held forth for nearly two hours. “I don’t think my style of speaking is calculated to hold the curious,” he admitted to Nellie, “but the audience which remained was most attentive.” She “could not but smile,” Nellie replied, when he mentioned the length of the speech. “If you confine it to an hour,” she suggested, “I think people will stay.”
A tense situation developed in mid-October, when a delegation of cigar and tobacco manufacturers, irate at Taft’s proposed reduction of the tariff on Philippine tobacco, threatened “to control cigar makers enough to defeat Roosevelt in N.Y., Conn, Missouri and almost everywhere else.” Enlisting the support of labor organizations in the cigar trade, they petitioned Congress and approached the president, “just at the anxious time when everything assumes distorted proportions.” That same day, Taft wrote to the president. “I feel sure you would not wish me to retract anything on that subject,” he began, adding that he would willingly cancel his appearances in affected states that might “emphasize the issue.” If the president felt it necessary, Taft concluded, he would retire from the cabinet rather than back down on the principle.
“Fiddle-dee-dee!” Roosevelt responded, quickly dismissing Taft’s resignation talk as “nerves, or something.” Wh
ile there was certainly no sense in exacerbating the issue by dwelling on the tobacco tariff, the New England states were precisely where his talent was most necessary. With this reassurance, Taft continued his grueling schedule but grumbled to his wife that the issue confirmed his resolve that he “would not run for President if you guaranteed the office. It is awful to be made afraid of one’s shadow.”
AS SUMMER ADVANCED INTO FALL, the struggles between labor and capital increasingly defined the campaign. Democrats sought to contrast Roosevelt, “a man who never needed to do a day’s work,” and Parker, “a man who has always had to work to maintain himself and his family.” This emblematic opposition sought to distinguish “the party of aristocracy and oligarchy” from “the party of liberty and equality.” Democratic newspapers predicted that the rank and file of labor would vote in record numbers against Roosevelt. “It is the culmination of many grievances which union labor has against the party and its leaders,” judged one paper. In Pennsylvania, Old Guard Republican senator Boies Penrose had “utterly ignored” union demands relating to construction of the state’s new capitol. In the Rocky Mountain states, the bitterness of union miners against conservative Governor Peabody threatened to supply Parker with such overwhelming labor support that Republicans were reportedly conceding the region to Democrats. The rising cost of living fueled these complaints of the working class, undercutting Republican campaign strategies of a “full dinner pail” that had once helped McKinley.
All the while, Roosevelt was hammered by party conservatives for being too friendly with labor. Day after day, the New York Sun savaged him for his actions in the coal strike, his temerity in inviting labor men to dinner at the White House, and his honorary membership in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. “He is on the side of the men who are every day seeking to overthrow the Constitution,” the Sun stridently charged. “He has joined their organizations, espoused their creed, received their leaders at his dwelling and in his official residence; and as President of the United States has welcomed their delegates.” Simultaneously, Roosevelt lamented that populist publications reviled him for breaking bread with the great corporate heads.
As this antagonism intensified, Ray Baker began drafting a piece for McClure’s to dissect each candidate’s point of view on the labor issue. He read every one of Judge Parker’s decisions addressing unions and corporations, discovering that “without exception,” they were “strongly favorable to the contentions of labor.” In one case, Parker had declared that “the state has a right to limit the hours of employment for bakers to sixty a week”; in another instance, he stated “that cities must pay the ‘prevailing rate of wages’ ”; in still another, he ruled in favor of the closed shop.
Baker expected a discussion of labor issues when he was invited to spend the afternoon with the judge at Esopus. “Personally he is a most attractive man—a good type of the comfortable country gentleman,” Baker told his father. “I was disappointed in finding him so apparently uninformed on labor affairs, though, of course, his mode of life has given him little opportunity of coming into contact with the great vital forces of the industrial conflict.” Indeed, beyond his judicial decisions, Baker was unable to decipher coherent underlying principles governing Parker’s approach to the paramount issue of the day.
In contrast, when Baker requested from Roosevelt a clarification of what many considered a contradictory position on the labor issue, Roosevelt promptly produced a nearly 2,000-word reply. “I cannot help feeling,” the president testily responded, “that the people who have been ‘confused by my action in the various labor cases,’ must be of such limited brain power that nothing in the world will make my position clear to them.” To comprehend his stance, he insisted, one need only study his words and actions over time. If such “creatures” remained confused, he continued, “I hardly think it will be possible to set them right; for they must be people who do not understand that when I say I wish to give a square deal to every man I mean just exactly that, and that I intend to stand by the capitalist when he is right and by the laboring man when he is right, and will oppose the one if he goes wrong just as fearlessly as I should oppose the other.” Those offended by his dinner invitations to labor leaders should understand that the White House door would always swing open for labor leaders “just as easily” as “for the big capitalists, but no easier.”
In this striking letter, Roosevelt proceeded to articulate his actions in the coal strike, the eight-hour day, the Colorado situation, immigration law, and convict labor. The basic principles and convictions Roosevelt so aggressively outlined spurred Baker to reread carefully all of the president’s speeches and writings on the subject of labor. “I am perfectly astonished,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “though I thought myself pretty well informed before—at the number and definiteness and breadth of your declarations on the labor question, as well as the record of your acts since your early days in the Legislature. And if I, who represent, perhaps the average busy American, am astonished, I believe a great many other people will be.”
Before the election, Baker’s article, entitled “Parker and Roosevelt on Labor: Real Views of the Two Candidates on the Most Vital National Problem,” appeared in McClure’s. Without any direct exposition or elaboration from Parker, Baker had relied on the judge’s reasoning in the applicable half-dozen cases he had presided over. On the other hand, with access to a lifetime of Roosevelt’s statements and decisions, Baker could present “a clear idea of the labor platform upon which he stands.” Beginning with Roosevelt’s early success as a state legislator against sweatshop conditions in tenement cigar factories, Baker demonstrated that, unlike Old Guard Republicans, the president was “a thoroughgoing believer in labor organization.” In contrast to radical Democrats, however, Roosevelt recognized that “there is no worse enemy of the wage-worker than the man who condones mob violence in any shape, or who preaches class hatred.”
The time and attention Roosevelt had devoted to the journalist’s request proved most rewarding. The Los Angeles Times observed that Baker’s “thorough and painstaking” methods provided McClure’s vast middle-class audience with a clear, illuminating portrait of the president’s fair-minded and long-standing attitudes toward labor.
WITH ONLY WEEKS REMAINING UNTIL the election, Roosevelt recognized that while “the bulk of the voters” would “oppose or support” him based on his three years in office, “a sufficient mass of voters” remained who might yet be swayed by a dramatic turn in the campaign. Mid-October delivered just such a development, when the discovery of immense corporate contributions to the Republican Party suddenly threatened to compromise Roosevelt’s hopes for victory. “The steady advance in the influence of money in our public life,” decried a New York Times editorial, works “as a poison on the minds and hearts of men.” Such toxicity was abundantly clear, the Times added, “when a man of Mr. Roosevelt’s native scorn for corruption can be the willing, the eager beneficiary of funds paid into his campaign chest through his former secretary and former cabinet officer [Mr. Cortelyou] with the undisguised hope that it will be repaid in favors to the subscribers.”
Lincoln Steffens called on Roosevelt at the White House to suggest that the issue could be lanced if he were to return all corporate contributions and look instead to small donations from the general public to fund his campaign. An informed public of small contributors “would make the millions feel that it was their government, as it is; and that you and your administration were beholden to the many, not to the few.” Such a change, Steffens believed, would herald a new era in election politics. “If we must have campaign contributions, this is the way to raise them,” he concluded. “If you would start this method now you really would begin a tremendous reform.”
Roosevelt “most emphatically” rejected the premise of Steffens’s argument, insisting that he already felt “beholden to the many more than to the few.” Whether an individual or corporation contributed one dollar or one hundred thousand dollars w
ould never sway him to sponsor legislation or take executive action. It was “entirely legitimate to accept contributions, no matter how large,” he contended, so long as “they were given and received with no thought of any more obligation on the part of the National Committee or of the National Administration than is implied in the statement that every man shall receive a square deal.”
In the end, Roosevelt willingly received hundreds of thousands of dollars from executives in dozens of corporations, including J. P. Morgan’s banking house, New York Central Railroad, Standard Oil, General Electric, and International Harvester. Only when apprised of a check for $100,000 from the Standard Oil Company, “the Mother of Trusts,” did Roosevelt draw the line. He instructed Cortelyou to return the money immediately: “In view of the open and pronounced opposition of the Standard Oil Company to the establishment of the Bureau of Corporations, one of the most important accomplishments of my Administration, I do not feel willing to accept its aid.” So long as other “big business corporations” believed that the country’s well-being could “only be secured through the continuance in power of the republican party,” however, he deemed their contributions “entirely proper.”
Roosevelt’s justification did not satisfy the editorial board of the New York Times. “The fact that the chief beneficiary of the process is blind to its gross impropriety,” declared the Times, “and can see in it only a means to the promotion of the welfare of the Nation dependent beyond question upon his attainment of the Presidential office by election shows how insidious and how irresistible has been the demoralization.” The general unseemliness of large corporate contributions made little impact on the campaign, however, since it was widely known that corporations habitually “contributed to both campaign funds.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 60